The Value of Having Well-Defined Values and a Clear Mission

To deliver a top-rated customer experience, your contact center agents need to be able to effectively communicate your brand’s values and mission.

March 21, 2017

From sourcing the right talent to providing effective training to keeping your workforce engaged, establishing and maintaining a successful contact center that builds brand loyalty is challenging. However, once you’ve created a continuous talent pipeline of quality workers and designed a successful talent management strategy, it’s important to ensure your people are aware of your brand’s mission and values—and that their actions and communications align with them. Without this, all the resources you invest in recruiting and training could be for nothing—and instead of building brand loyalty, you could be hemorrhaging customers.

Let’s take a quick look at the recent developments surrounding contact centers. Research by Ovum shows that 54 percent of consumers find automated telephony systems annoying. Furthermore, 66 percent of consumers want easier access to human representatives. However, this doesn’t have to be by phone: the number of consumers using live chat has more than doubled over the past 24 months from 10 to 26 percent.

In addition, after years of offshoring contact centers to countries where labor and services were more affordable than the U.S., there’s now a wave of companies quietly onshoring this critical aspect of their customer services. In her CIO article titled “Why outsourced call center roles are coming back onshore,” Stephanie Overby cites a study by Everest Group that showed that the number of contracts for onshore contact centers climbed from 35 percent in 2010 to 53 percent in 2015. One reason this change is taking place is the adoption of technology and security enhancements that enable the work to be ported to the talent. Through these technology gains, it reduces the traditional infrastructure costs which provides a small offset against the higher wage costs on onshore vs offshore.

Clearly, companies have been trying to achieve cost savings in the service department for years. However, they’re now beginning to realize that customer service is an investment that—when done right—can yield a high ROI in terms of customer retention and brand loyalty.

And that’s precisely where having well defined values and a clear mission come in. In order for your customers to have an outstanding experience every time they contact your company, your agents’ training needs to be fueled by your mission and values. Of course, technology and product knowledge is hugely important. But knowing what your vision for the customer experience is and being able to deliver that experience is critical to building brand loyalty.

Ensuring your people understand your values and mission relies entirely on strong communication. They need to know who your customers are, what those customers need, and what the role of the agent is in providing that solution. They need to be sure that they have the right resources to provide top quality service—and that includes having support from their higher-ups when necessary. They need to undergo regular training to ensure they’re current on all new aspects of your services and products, as well as the technology they use. And last but not least, they need to hear both negative and positive feedback in order to understand where they can improve—and where they’re doing an outstanding job.

In order to deliver a top-rated customer experience, your contact center agents need to be able to effectively communicate your brand’s values and mission, as well as act accordingly. That’s why keeping talent trained and informed about the brand they’ll be representing is as important as the technology they’ll use to connect with customers.